How to Network When You Live Out of a Suitcase
People ask me all the time how I manage to network while living out of a suitcase, and honestly, I get why they’re curious. It sounds chaotic from the outside, new cities every month or so, different coworking spaces, shifting time zones, different languages, but for me, networking hasn’t become harder. If anything, this lifestyle has made it even more natural.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m a people person. I’ve always been able to walk into a room and walk out with five new conversations to follow up on later. That didn’t change just because I packed my life into a suitcase and hit the road. What changed is the radius of who I meet. My “local” meeting radius now spans countries.
I still attend traditional networking events, I just attend them everywhere. Some months it’s London or Paris, other months it’s Toronto or Houston. I still show up to conferences, I still meet with people intentionally, I still have those long, nerdy logistics conversations that somehow always end with “Should we collaborate on something?” The networking hasn’t disappeared; it’s simply expanded.
What surprises people is that some of my strongest connections haven’t come from formal events at all. They’ve happened because someone overheard me talking about freight at a café, or we shared a table at a crowded Christmas market, or we bonded over the same coworking frustration, likely wifi. There’s something about being in new places that makes people more open, and those tiny, unexpected interactions often turn into real relationships, professional or otherwise.
And to be clear, networking as a nomad isn’t about “working the room.” Most days, it’s simply about being present and curious. It’s asking a follow-up question. It’s mentioning what you do without turning it into a pitch. It’s letting conversations go where they naturally want to go. When you live this way, networking stops being a task and becomes something that just… happens. You meet different people because you're in different places, and the overlap between the right person and the right moment becomes surprisingly frequent.
December especially makes everything easier, people are softer, slower, more willing to chat whether you're in a market, a coffee shop, or huddled under a heater at an outdoor bar with strangers who are also trying to stay warm. These aren’t “networking opportunities” in the traditional sense, but sometimes it just happens.
So when people ask how I network while traveling, the honest answer is simple: I don’t force it. I don’t treat it like a strategy. I just live my life, talk to people, be genuinely interested in them, and the rest takes care of itself. Networking didn’t get harder when I became a digital nomad, it just got more global, more interesting, and a lot more fun.
